Multi-Directional Heuristic Search

Multi-Directional Heuristic Search

Dor Atzmon, Jiaoyang Li, Ariel Felner, Eliran Nachmani, Shahaf Shperberg, Nathan Sturtevant, Sven Koenig

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4062-4068. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/562

In the Multi-Agent Meeting problem (MAM), the task is to find a meeting location for multiple agents, as well as a path for each agent to that location. In this paper, we introduce MM*, a Multi-Directional Heuristic Search algorithm that finds the optimal meeting location under different cost functions. MM* generalizes the Meet in the Middle (MM) bidirectional search algorithm to the case of finding an optimal meeting location for multiple agents. Several admissible heuristics are proposed, and experiments demonstrate the benefits of MM*.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning and Scheduling
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search